[Ti] Why do URL's die when wrapped?

b flipper at macsrule.com
Mon Jan 27 12:18:50 PST 2003


>Why would a email client force a wrap at any particular place? Why 
>would the client not just autowrap to the windows size? I've just 
>checked Apple's Mail, Eudora, and Entourage. The only one that 
>forces text to wrap at a particular line length is Entourage which 
>wraps the text at 76 characters whether I like it or not.
>
>Can I change this? Why does Entourage force this? It is looking like 
>Entourage is causing the problems here. Is Flipper using Entourage? 
>Is that why he has to insert spaces in his URLs? This certainly 
>seems to be on a path to creating a problem rather than solving one. 
>URLs do not have spaces in them an certainly some clients will bark 
>at their existence.
>--

No, I believe that the manner in which mail messages are displayed, 
differs, but all emailers wrap somewhere these days. Maybe the 
wrapping [which one sees in those 'quotes' where every other line is 
only one or two words] occurs only in certain mail apps, or on the 
the output from smtp servers, i don't know.

It used to be that email clients sent one long line of text, broken 
only [on the sender's end] by hard carriage returns, or paragraphs. 
As i compose this text, here, in Eudora, I can stretch the window so 
that it spans two monitors and there is no 'wrap' at all. Except for 
the paragraph 'commands'.

Word wrap has never bothered me, and I  have to assume that the 
'uglier', unbalanced line lengths, that one sees in other people's 
"quoted" text, occasionally, must originate from Entourage,or 
Outlook.. I never have problems with my 'own' URLs, yet, we see, all 
the time, that URLs that are underlined on one line, and 'broken' 
[i.e. not underlined, and not in brackets] don't always work Or, 
they'll lead to a 'parent' and some of the 'children' of the URLs 
domain structure, but not all the way to the intended URL's page. My 
point was that this is where the email app is 'forcing a normal [in 
it's terms] line break, and by the user 'forcing a carriage return 
before that point, the break in the URL can be prevented.

A forced carriage return does not put a 'space' in the line, a wrap 
does. A carriage return puts a <CR> there, and any email client 
worth, er, anything, knows the difference between a <CR> and a <%20>.

cheers,
~flipper



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